Patty Astor in a Still from Celine Danhier's BLANK CITY, 2009
Last night, Laura and I were privileged to attend the world premier of Celine Danhier's BLANK CITY at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is a beautifully directed documentary montage about the underground cinema scene in New York in the late '70s and early '80s. The soundtrack features a great selection of music from that era by Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Contortions, DNA, Theoretical Girls, my old band The Dance, and many others. The narrative is carried by a series of fantastic interviews with many of the key players in No Wave cinema and music, including Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Lydia Lunch, Beth & Scott B, James Chance -- and an incredible collection of film clips from long lost archives -- films so obscure that they may have only been shown once in somebody's apartment, but were nevertheless at the forefront of the fiercely iconoclastic creative groundswell of that moment in New York. Danhier's film gloriously and accurately portrays the scene's gritty, dangerous, druggy adrenalin, and while convincingly asserting the truth, courage, and historical importance of all those uncompromising projects, also erases any trace of nostalgia for that time.
Ela Orleans
In her press release, the music of Ela Orleans is perfectly described as "like the first kiss from a new lover at a rain soaked funeral". The Polish artist, now living in Brooklyn, makes lilting melancholy electronic constructions using tape loops and found snippets, slide quitar, keyboards and other instruments. She sings in a voice that is both vulnerable and resolute, with a slight East European accent that is a bit like a more melodic, much less ponderous Nico. Her lyrics are often laced with subtle humor and are always surprising in their candor and phrasing. Coming from a Cagean spirit of experimentation, Ela has developed an utterly personal style of melodic sound collage and songmaking that is capable of conveying a deep sense of aliveness -- taking in information from the world and transforming it through sound into pure feeling. The songs are constructed loosely with imperfections showing, which makes the integrity of their construction part of their content -- their truth. Ela has just released her first solo record called "High Moon Low Sun" on the Italian Setola di Maiale label. This is by no means your typical art music, not rock n roll, not exactly pop -- it is an absolutely original hybrid -- what Ela modestly calls "movies for ears".
Eva Lake’s recent blog post and subsequent comments about Thurston Moore’s new book on the No Wave music scene, and the notion of the subjectivity of oral history made me think of a great and hilarious piece called “Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem from 2005 – check out the lyrics -- and here's the video.
The NY underground music scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was a pretty small scene – everybody knew everybody, whether they spoke to each other or not. And while there are certainly plenty of areas of consensus, each participant was a fiercely independent artist, experiencing that moment in an individual way, and now 30 years down the road holds his/her own memory and version of how it happened and what the most important contributions were. There are many great stories to be told.
Patty Astor in a Still from Celine Danhier's BLANK CITY, 2009
